Member Perspective: Adam Pardes

Why is mental health in the workplace so important and what resources are available to employees who are seeking better care from their providers?

To properly address mental health in the workplace, employers must ask themselves: what can we do to make employees as happy as possible in their professional and personal lives? Discovering the answers should ultimately benefit companies, but we believe asking and answering this question is simply the right thing to do.

At some point, you or someone close to you has likely struggled with mental health. Acknowledging this reality inspires management to create resources that benefit them and their teams. Equally important is that mental health is not always a matter of crisis, but rather something that requires ongoing consideration. At NeuroFlow, we offer a mental wellness benefit where employees are reimbursed for activities such as massage, yoga classes, and therapy. While these activities are private, oftentimes employees and I will mark them on our calendars for everyone to see. Doing so helps to encourage and, perhaps more importantly, normalize, the usage of the benefit.

This year, our co-founder and CEO moderated a Philly Tech Week panel on strategies to address mental health stigma in the workplace and beyond. Additionally, one of our employees taught a seminar on language that destigmatizes mental health. Dismantling stigma in the workplace creates a culture where employees feel safe and empowered to seek support. Mental health in an organization can be addressed with presentations or guest speakers. Yet some companies take more interactive approaches. At NeuroFlow, the entire company completed a Mental Health First Aid training. The course helps people understand what language to use, good ways to identify if someone is having challenges with their mental health, and how to approach these conversations not just in the workplace but in general. As a mental health company, it’s relevant to us, but I think it’s important that companies educate their workforce in skills that are useful to build healthy culture at work and elsewhere.

By addressing mental health, our organizations can live up to Philadelphia’s name as the City of Brotherly Love. We can create win-win resources through education, wellness incentives and leading by example to eliminate mental health stigma that benefit the company and its workers to create a more resilient, productive and happier workforce.

NeuroFlow is a member of the Chamber’s Health Care Action Team (HCAT), a unique, cross-functional group of 135+ leaders working to leverage the region’s health care and technology assets and is transforming our 11-county community into the global leader in health care innovation.

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